Introducing one of Ellaspede’s most extensive builds to date - all made possible by the amazing patronage of our client Colm.
Our first contact with Colm actually came when he approached us with the idea of building a BMW R100R after touring the BMW Museum in Munich. A few emails back and forth and a meeting or two in person solidified that Ellaspede was the right place to bring Colm’s vision to life, but after eyeing some builds from Garage 14 and X-Axis, the donor vehicle pivoted and the hunt for a Honda CBX750F began.
 

It was a bit of a strange time to be buying a motorcycle at that particular moment, particularly a bike that wasn’t exactly common here to begin with. The post-COVID frenzy saw the the bones of Australia’s isolated second hand vehicle market picked dry and every dusty relic was suddenly worth its weight in gold. So, Colm did the sensible thing and purchased a bike sight-unseen from Japan. Straight to the source! The longer than expected delivery route worked in our favour though, giving us the perfect window to get busy on the design front. Some clients come to us with a meticulously prepared spreadsheet detailing exactly how they’d like their bike to look, whilst others like Colm begin with a much more open ended brief. His initial brief amounted to ‘Can you build me a bike that you’d own and ride yourself? My only request is that it needs twin square headlights like the original’. From a client brief perspective, that’s pretty much music to our ears.

Our usual process involves us gathering up inspiration images from any field that sparks us, checking out what amazing creations our fellow custom builders have been turning out and then trying to meld it all into something unique and original to us. We’re old school in the sense that all of our designs still start with a pen and paper. We hand sketch all of our designs before dropping them into Photoshop to render them up and have a play around with various colour way and livery options.

From really very early in the mix, we knew we wanted to lean on the CBX’s 1980’s contemporaries as influences, and nothing from that decade screams louder to us than the Ferrari Testarossa. The horizontal lines and rounded of surfaces of the Testarossa’s iconic tail were a must-have - a custom brake/tail piece that lit up in striped sections was an homage that we were hopeful we could pull off elegantly.
 

We knew we’d be stripping the front cowl and body fairings off, which would leave the tank looking a bit odd and out of place once removed. We took this as an opportunity to add a bit of muscle to the body lines by designing some tank flares that would cover up the exposed fairing mounts whilst also providing a background to mount some CNC machined aluminium badges. Continuing the injection of muscle, we designed up some 2-into-1 CNC machined manifolds to put some beefy exposed air filters on display. Despite significantly slimming down the electrical system with a Motogadget mo.unit, we knew we’d still have a fair amount of componentry to hide away along with the battery. To keep all of this tucked out of view, we built in some side covers and with a heavy scallop to accommodate the K&N filters.
 

An initial concept for the build involved grafting a later model CBR1000R swing arm onto the bike and adding a bit of Akira flair by way of some custom aero-disc wheel covers. After a bit of poking around though it wasn’t feeling quite right to us, so we abandoned that in favour of the absolutely stunning Ducati 1198 swingarm. We floated the idea of pairing the single-sided swingarm with a carbon rim from BST for uuh… weight saving or something - and Colm was right on board. With those beauties lined up, covering up the wheels with aero-discs was well and truly out of the question.

We wanted to balance the modernisation around the rest of the bike and add improvements to the safety and handling at the same time, so our plan from the outset was to upgrade the front forks and brakes. It just so happened that at this time, the long standing Australian Ohlins distributor, Stever Cramer Products, was transitioning that supply account over to one of the big four distributors in Ficeda. As a result, Steve and the team had a complete Ohlins front end meant for a BMW R nineT laying around in ex-stock. We did some calculations to confirm its suitability and jumped at the chance. Fortune was shining on us, as it turned out BST make a matching front wheel for the R nineT that would slot in perfectly and finish Colm’s new carbon wheel set.

So, with our design plan quickly taking shape and a parts shelf turning into a menagerie of modern performance bits, we finally took delivery of the bike. A quick blast around the block signalled that a few horses had left the paddock since it originally rolled out of the Honda factory back in ’84. A bit of compression and leak-down testing confirmed our suspicions beyond any doubt. We knew we couldn’t put a tired engine in this kind of a build, not after saving so much weight with those beautiful carbon wheels! So we shoehorned the engine out and sent it off to Stuart Firth of Firth Racing, and name known to anyone familiar with bikes going quick.
 

Given that the bike was now forty years old, it wasn’t exactly straightforward to source parts. So, lets just take a moment in this write-up to acknowledge what an incredible resource we have in CMSNL! The parts we’re able to source from them have saved bikes from permanent relegation to the back shed on countless occasions around here, a good portion of our older bikes couldn’t dream of seeing the open road again without them! So with CMS saving us the indignity of being laughed out of the local Honda parts department and Stuart working his magic on the donk, we got to work doing what we do best - making all of the bits that don’t exist yet.

First up, a rough mock-up to dial in the stance, which involved cutting off the rear section of the frame, engineering it to transition from a twin shock to a mono shock, and spacing it all out to receive the single-sided swingarm with correctly running chain clearances and all of that final-drive fun. Speaking of which, it was at this point we were able to earmark a future headache that would require rectifying, as the front and rear sprockets were very reluctant to line up. We stuck a masking tape note on that one for our future selves, wished them luck, and escaped up to the front end of the bike.

Initial fitment of the front end confirmed our previous calculations that the new forks might throw the trail and rake out of whack a bit, so with geometry troubles at both ends and nowhere else to run, we measured and modelled up a new neck that would get the CBX sitting pretty once more. Once that piece was in our hands, we sliced out the stock neck and welded in the replacement at the correct angle.

We then turned our attention to all the custom parts we’d sketched up, and one by one brought them into reality. First up was the seat - Leo had visualised this part having a visual pass-through in his design sketches, another cue taken from the Testarossa. In order to achieve a cohesive look, we created the entire seat cowl and brake/tail light as a complete unit in CAD. After a few test runs on the 3D printer, the design was refined and sent off for CNC machining from a combination of billet aluminium and block polycarbonate.

It’ll come as a surprise to absolutely no one that we’re big fans of Motogadget around here - pretty much all of our major scale builds get the mo.unit treatment along with a family of accessory products, and the CBX wasn’t going to buck that trend. So we mapped that out, ensuring all the required components would have an organised home. Ultimately, in order to keep everything as tidy and minimal as possible, we cut out a section on the underside of the tank and housed the battery comfortably away in there.

Around this time we took delivery of the reinvigorated engine, which meant we could properly investigate how our air intake setup would perform. It took some serious trial and error to nail down the correct airflow, as despite presenting as unobstructed in computer modelling we all know that doesn’t always translate directly in practice. Having the bike on hand to start and run allowed us to 3D print an array of manifold options to test until we could get things dialled in perfectly. With this tick of approval, off they went for CNC machining in aluminium.

By this stage, we were itching for a test ride to check how all of the new components meshed with each other dynamically before finalising fabrication and sending everything off for second finishes. Unfortunately, this was when our misaligned sprockets came home to roost and we realised we still had to solve the small issue of delivering Colm’s refreshed engine power to that slick new rear wheel. We were able to fabricate a custom front sprocket carrier, which pushed the drive alignment out enough at the front to get things running true. The flow on from this was that we needed to machine a new clutch pushrod to space off the clutch slave, but the drive was aligned so we weren’t complaining. Test riding time finally arrived, and whilst there was still a bit of tuning to do, we were relieved to confirm that the very particular combination of parts we’d selected was going to behave together as we’d hoped.

The headlight was one of the final big-ticket items to deal with, and being the only prerequisite Colm had flagged for us, we wanted to get it right. Originally, we considered salvaging the iconic original headlights, something that both the Garage 14 and X-Axis builds that originally piqued Colm’s interest achieved to great effect. But with all of the modern additions we’d added, we wanted to try to put our own twist on the design and tie in the classic styling with the newer performance parts. The custom headlight housing drew a bit of inspiration from the Viewmaster, a toy invented well before the 80’s, but undoubtedly prolific in the playrooms and toy boxes of that decade. We also took the opportunity to incorporate an ‘X’ motif, and upgraded the light source to LEDs.

When it came time for the final call on paint and second finishing, Colm was still torn between a few of the concept liveries we’d put together for him. There were particular elements from each design that jumped out at him, so we mashed those winning components together to form the final look you’re seeing today. Our usual approach to engine finishing is a pretty uniform look, with perhaps just a bit of linishing for contrast. But for the CBX, we loved the combination of gloss and matte parts that had formed through the rest of the bike and wanted to continue to emphasise that with the engine surfaces, which we think helps to provide a distinct background and foreground effect.

With everything buttoned up and the final tune dialled in, there was nothing left to do but ride! Colm has been enjoying becoming innately familiar with his CBX locally for a while now, but the decision has now been made for he and his family to head back to his hometown back in Ireland - thankfully, he likes the bike enough that it’s going over with him! We can’t wait for the opportunity to head over and say g’day to Colm and the CBX750 someday, perhaps amongst the madness of the North West 200. We’d like to give a huge thanks to Colm for giving us his trust and the opportunity to exercise our creative freedom on his build, we couldn’t ask for a better result with both bike and customer!


Watch the test ride back here - https://youtu.be/mIYfjpLKslE